BUFFALO, NY — Maybe it was getting his first video game, Cosmic Avenger, for Christmas at age 12, and then having to wait an entire year for the hard-to-land ColecoVision console to play it on that made Michael Thomasson so determined to get his hands on every video game and system he could find.

Now, 31 years and roughly 11,000 games later, Thomasson is the newly crowned world-record holder for having the largest collection of video games, featured in a two-page spread in “Guinness World Records 2014 Gamer’s Edition.”

“I have games on cartridge, laser disc. I have VHS-based games, cassette-based games,” Thomasson said, standing among the collection that fills the basement of his Buffalo home.

Sure, he’s got the Xboxes and PlayStations, but also obscure consoles like the Casio Loopy, the only game system specifically geared toward girls, which came out in Japan in 1995. And, of course, the ColecoVision unit.

“It’s my first love, so it’s sentimental,” Thomasson said. But the games also were quality, with very little of the “shovelware” — mediocre, rushed releases — typical of many systems, he said.

“They looked good, they played good. For the time they sounded good,” he said, “for the bleeps and blips of the 80s.”

Thomasson began collecting almost immediately, he said, but the path to the world record had a couple of restarts. He sold off his collection twice — once to pay for his 1998 wedding.

Since then, Thomasson has methodically rebuilt the collection, averaging two games per day on a strict $3,000-a-year budget, which means never paying full price. He estimates the collection is worth $700,000 to $800,000.

The father of a 5-year-old girl, Thomasson hasn’t played every game he owns.

“I probably get three hours of playing in a week,” he said. “If I’m lucky.”

Guinness lists the number Thomasson’s collection at 10,607 games, although he said the number exceeds 11,000 now, a year after the official count.